Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books by Wendy Lesser (review)

A good book is oftentimes good for more than one reason, since good books generally do not only contain good characters, or only have a good plotline, or only speak with a compelling narrative voice. Wendy Lesser illustrates this point clearly throughout Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books. As the editor of the renowned literary magazine The Threepenny Review, she reads a great deal in her daily life. What she chooses to read for pleasure runs the gamut from the classics of English, French, and Russian literature to popular American crime novels, and all of these contain books Lesser would consider good literature. She uses examples from a number of different books, classic and contemporary, lengthy and concise, novels and biographies and even pieces of epic poetry, in order to discuss the characteristics that make a book worth reading.

These characteristics include character and plot, along with such aspects of a story as its novelty, how it evokes grandeur and intimacy, and the authority its writer projects. Lesser is extremely well-read, and the easy manner in which she discusses some of the most complex and difficult pieces of literature speaks to her own status as an authority on the art of reading. For novelty in a story, she points toward Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote, also holding up Melville’s book as an example of the use of writer’s use of authority in a narrative. She cites Henry James’s works throughout her book, and it is clear that she finds his writing particularly compelling. However, the author she discusses most often is Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and she uses his novel The Brothers Karamazov as an example of many aspects of a story that will keep her reading.

At one point, Lesser writes about the “linguistic intimacy” Dostoyevsky achieves in The Brothers Karamazov (130), citing the first few sentences of the novel in order to show how even at the word level, Dostoyevsky’s narrator is at some points close associate and at others dispassionate observer. This naturally leads to the observation that Dostoyevsky in fact never actually wrote the words that Lesser applauds for this linguistic intimacy, since they are, of course, cited in English in her book. Lesser admits that she is unable to read the non-English literary works she cites in their native languages, and she devotes a chapter of Why I Read to the debt of gratitude she owes to those who have translated the non-English books she loves so well. This is an asset to Lesser’s book, as she highlights the differences that can occur in the same novel from one translation to another and pays homage to the vitally important but all too often overlooked work of the translator.

Lesser concludes Why I Read with a list of 100 books that she insists are not necessarily to be considered canonical or a list of the best books, but merely those that have brought her a great deal of pleasure in reading. Her main limitation in making this list seems to be that she only includes one work per author, which makes some of her choices and omissions particularly noteworthy. Given Lesser’s frequent references to The Brothers Karamazov, it is curious that she chooses Crime and Punishment for the Dostoyevsky piece on her list. Similarly, the omission of Cervantes from her list is surprising, as Don Quixote illustrates for her so many aspects of a great book. Her choice of Patricia Highsmith’s The Complete Ripley Novels seems economical, if nothing else, as it amounts to picking five books for the price of one. Overall, this list is a good addition to Lesser’s book, in part because it encourages readers to think about the choices she has made, but also because it encourages readers to pick up some of the suggested books they might not yet have read and decide the...